Geoengineering: Rolling the dice with the only planet we've got

If "geoengineering" is truly becoming a mainstream concept, as suggested by Chris Mooney at the Intersection (based on a recent mention in Time magazine), then we are truly on a dangerous path.

Time writes, "Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort."

Are we already reduced to thinking about last resorts?   If we ever reach the point that we have to say, Let's purposefully try to mess up our planet's extremely complicated climate system in order to restore a poorly understood equilibrium that we lost a while back," then we are truly f****d. 

We don't have a planet to practice on.  We've never done anything like that before.  What are the odds it would work as intended?

If we reach that point, it's far worse than the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game, or pulling the goalie at the end of a hockey game.  After all, those strategies have been tried before and we know they can work, if rarely.  In the case of geongineering, it won't work.  To even think of attempting it is to think that we're doomed anyway so we might as well have some fun on the way out.

We're not there yet, thankfully, so let's send the talk of geoengineering back to the science fiction books where it belongs.

Comments

[Greg Harman]

Thanks for these comments. It constantly amazes me how quickly Big Untested Solutions are embraced over simpler behavioral changes.
What weather modifications we have made already through industrialization are here for at least the next several hundred years. Even if we killed petro-power for illuminated butterfly solutions today (nothing but renewables and calorie-free candies), the climate lag time is significant. It takes decades to build up carbon and decades more to expel it.
Yes, we are finding our soils and seas are reaching their limits on carbon absorption (leading to theories of "rapid climate change" that i, for one, can't dismiss with a shrug), but why is it easier to let a handful of scientists dump tens of thousands of pounds of iron shavings into the Ocean than to kickstart an international treeplanting crusade? Trees are a fairly safe bet. We know what they do and we know the planet is short on forest by over half.
Iron filings? Orbiting solar shades? Robot pollinators? We'll see, maybe.

[LoB]

The idea about iron filings seems ludicrous to me for the same reasons that Greg Harmon mentioned. It also sounds like a really fun research project for scientists and engineers. How much iron would you have to add to the ocean to get the results you wanted? Where, exactly, would you put it all? How would that much iron affect the ocean chemistry? What impact would those changes have on marine life? The rest of the planet? A good set of researchers could work on this problem all the way to their retirement...

But scientists and engineers can't make that research money become available for the taking and they can't authorize the actual dumping of any iron filings. Follow the big money to find the driving force behind any of these ad hoc ideas. It's an old story by now, isn't it?